alex shearer We were cloud hunting You find many Some What did you do Well a whole variety of things But none of them ever seemed as good as interesting or as exciting as gliding through mile after mile of clear blue sky chasing the wisps of distant vapor speeding towards the faraway patches of cloud trying to get there before anyone else did and then coming home with the tanks full of water to sell Nothing could compare to that Not in my eyes I wanted to go with them but was afraid to ask knowing that even if I did ask I would be refused Or if I wasn’t refused by them then my parents wouldn’t allow me to go Yet it wasn’t that I lacked the courage to make the journey I just lacked the courage to ask to go on it It’s strange how sometimes it is easier to act than to speak You’d think it would be the other way around (cid:82) Now boys and girls are supposedly different from each other in many more ways than the obvious And as much as boys may spend a lot of time thinking about girls when they get to a certain age and vice versa the fact is that they do not much hang out together At least not until Until they do that is But that was an until that was still a while away 3
THE CLOUD HUNTERS But in some ways Jenine was like a boy in the way she thought and the way she acted so it wasn’t so dif ficult to get to know her Maybe I even thought that I could capture her the way her mother’s boat cap tured the clouds and then I would have the essence of her possessed and distilled I thought it would be like chemistry when you reduce some solution to a mere few droplets and you can hold it in a bottle with a stopper on the top or in a test tube Well if I did think that I thought wrong You can’t capture a person that way or change them from cloud to water But you can make a friend of them simply by letting them be and by allowing them to know that you make no claims on them Then there you have it the cloud in your hand and as long as you don’t try to close your fist and your fingers around it you can keep it it’s yours But if you do try to hold it it just slips from your grasp I didn’t mind the teasing or if the others said she was my girlfriend which she wasn’t she was just a friend who happened to be a girl I didn’t overdo it either or spend too much time talking to her or make an obvi ous point of it I was just friendly that was all I was just keeping a friendship warm just waiting biding my time and then one day I would find the courage to ask the question And with luck the answer would be yes Although now when I look back I realize that I had far more than one question to ask 4
2 Morning Sometimes I would see the Cloud Hunters leave port in the cool breath of early morning It was hard for me to make my steps continue on their way to school after that They were all I could see all I could think of And to me right there right then there could be no finer life no greater excitement than to be sailing aloft in search of the great soft cotton wool clouds But I was just a school student and my father and mother were administrators and office workers They wore fashionable clothes and suits and kept regular hours They could never have been Cloud Hunters in a million years For the Cloud Hunters were like gypsies and renegades with earrings and jewels hennaed hands and tattoos bracelets and bands of gold and with dark mysterious looks They were outcasts and adventurers and I longed to be one of them the way that a volunteer knowing noth ing of war might long to be a soldier The reality of war its pain and fear its terror and discomfort and depriva tion meant nothing All the naive onlooker and would be recruit could perceive was war’s romance 5
THE CLOUD HUNTERS Yes I wanted to go with them wanted to fly away to chase the clouds to sail above the sun and into the far reaches of the upper air I knew I would never get to go never not in a week or a month or a year of Sundays or any days at all But then my chance came and I took it and just for a little while I became a Cloud Hunter too So that was what happened That was my good luck And this is my story 6
